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Introduction ​

Cairn is a desktop app for orchestrating coding agents.

How work is organized ​

Issues contain a timeline of jobs, each with its own Claude session. Agents can spawn subtasks to explore multiple directions or delegate work.

Everything accumulates: chat transcripts, artifacts, PRs, review feedback. Days or weeks later, you can trace the full history of how something was built.

Issue example

Local execution ​

Agents run as local processes with full environment access - build commands, tests, databases, authenticated CLIs, filesystem. Each job gets a git worktree, an ordinary local directory any tool can interact with.

Parallel workflows ​

Agents in the same directory risk conflicts. Isolating them in containers adds overhead and reduces interactivity.

Cairn's worktrees provide isolation without overhead. Each job manages its own local worktree, so parallel agents can't conflict, but opening a terminal in a job puts you there immediately. A task noticed mid-work can become its own issue and merge independently while the original continues. Managing parallel agents stays as interactive as working with one.